Red Storm
by C. Sandman
Summary: MI6's new project "Red Storm" has been targeted by an international terrorist who has possession of a high-powered electromagnetic pulse generator with the capacity to thow ever major city in the world into chaos...
1. Default Chapter

ORION  
  
Much later, when it became both his job and obsession to determine what actually happened at the launch pad, he would remember how every little detail had gone just right until everything just went terribly wrong, turning anxiousness and anticipation into horror and disbelief, and forever changing the course of his life. There was James Bond who existed before the disaster, and the James Bond who eventually arose from its ashes. They were two very different men.  
  
The morning's weather broadcast had promised perfect weather for the launch: no wind, moderate temperatures, a clear blue sky with very little cloud and the sun shining brightly on Pad 38C near the coast. James would never forget that beautiful sky; never forget looking out of the Launch Control Tower at the space shuttle.  
  
Indeed, the preparations for Spartan I had gone without a problem from the very start. There had been no false starts, no last minute technical glitches that usually cause the missions to be postponed for a day or two. Everything had seemed just right.  
  
At T minus one hour, thirty-five minutes, James had joined members of the MMT (mission management team) and other NASA officials. He was still surprised by the number of reporters waiting outside the launch area, their microphones covered with those fuzzy wind baffles that looked like oversized insects. There had even been a host from one of the early morning shows, Fred-somebody-or-other, who dragged him in front of the cameras for a comment.  
  
James supposed he should have been prepared for the attention. It wasn't every day that the United States and the British were carrying out a mission together. They were going to put a highly advanced surveillance satellite in orbit to aid the CIA, FBI, MI5 and MI6.  
  
The mission had been long delayed due to budget cuts and funding problems. It was finally being put into orbit, where it would be connected to a base piece that was sent up just two weeks earlier. The mission also had to be on schedule because a nuclear missile was launched from a Russian base in Kazakhstan a week earlier as protest to political movements in Moscow. They had to act quickly before Russia broke out in a civil war.  
  
But such thoughts had a proper time and place, and James' personal trials had been the furthest thing in his mind as he stood outside the restricted access door to Pad 38C. The crew had Britain's finest and most important to him it had his wife, Samantha Bond. He watched his wife lead Spartan I's crew into the shuttle like silver transport vehicle with the blue and white NASA sign on its side. His wife and the four men and women were scheduled to make history. He would be in constant contact from the control room, but nonetheless they felt like his extended family.  
  
He would always remember how Samantha paused before entering the vehicle, her eyes scanning the crowd, seeking out his face amongst the many others turned in her direction, The mission commander, and a fellow graduate of the astronaut class of '86, Samantha was a striking, vigorous woman who seemed to pulsate with confidence... and, at that particular moment, an impatience only another astronaut who'd seen the earth from 250 miles up could fully understand.  
  
"VIP's, first and always," she said, knowing he'd be unable to hear her in the commotion, moving her lips slowly so he could read them without any trouble. Grinning at him, then, pointing her thumb at one of the breast patches on her orange launch suit.  
  
James chuckled. His mind flashed back to when they first met at Oxford where he was taking a Latin seminar and the old motto they'd come up with.  
  
"Terra nos respute," he mouthed in Latin.  
  
Time and space will never come between us.  
  
Samantha's grin widened, her eyes showing good humour. Then she gave him a little salute, turned, and entered the transport.  
  
"Woodpeckers," said Robinson entering the control room. "No good, goddamn woodpeckers!"  
  
"Woodpeckers?" James asked curiously.  
  
"They've found their way into the main shuttle hanger. They've started to peck away at the ship mistaking it for a tree! The next shuttle launch has been postponed because of it."  
  
"Not again," James moaned. "That was supposed to be Samantha's last launch. How much longer before they can fix it?"  
  
"It'll take about a week," said Robinson. "You're anxious to get home, I can tell."  
  
"Four weeks in the blazing sun can do that to you. But based on what I can see, it'll be an "easy" run today," he said.  
  
And he was right. Shortly after making his prediction, James saw the MT's go to their positions and reach for their headsets. He looked up at the big screen across the room which showed the crew getting into their seats. Samantha and her pilot, Lee Hung. Microbiologist Scott Tomas, Mission Viewer Karen Tang and the three remaining crew members were still below deck.  
  
Yes, in his heart, in his mind, he was right there in the cockpit with them.  
  
It was T minus six minutes and counting.  
  
James listened to the voices in his headset.  
  
"- Control, Spartan I here. UPA's heating up," Samantha was saying. "It's HI flying today, over."  
  
"Roger, proceed, over," the controller replied.  
  
"Okay, engines three and four humming away."  
  
James felt his eagerness building. Everything was a go. Soon, the shuttle would be in the air. They were down to the wire.  
  
At T minus two minutes the control tower declared that they were ready for launch, and James felt the tingling that had started in his fingers rush through his entire body.  
  
He would remember checking the countdown clock on his console at T minus six seconds – when Spartan I's engines were supposed to ignite half a second apart which was done by computers.  
  
Instead, things went terribly wrong. Unforgettably wrong.  
  
From the time James picked up the first sign of trouble over his link to the disaster's final moments everything seemed to go wrong with dreadful rapidity.  
  
"Control, I'm seeing a red light for engine number three." The urgent voice belonged to Samantha. A second later James heard something else in the background, the shrill of the master alarm. "We've got an overheated engine... cabin pressure is dropping... there's smoke in the cabin,"  
  
Shock bolted through the control room. The Controller was struggling to remain calm. "We're aborting at once, copy? Evacuate orbiter!"  
  
"Read you," Samantha coughed. "I –we, hard to see."  
  
Come on, James thought. Keeping his gaze on the monitor waiting for the crew to emerge from the spacecraft. Where are you?  
  
Then, suddenly, he thought that he saw several figures appear on the railed platform on the east side of the service structure – the side where the escape baskets were located. But the distance of the video cameras from the pad made it had to be sure.  
  
James watched and waited, his eyes still narrowed on the screen.  
  
He had no sooner grown convinced that he had, in fact, spotted Spartan I's crew, or at least some of its crew members, than the first explosion rocked the service structure with a force that was strong enough to rattle the control room's windows. James seemed to feel rather than hear the sound, feel it as sickening, awful percussion in his bones.  
  
He snapped forward in his seat, mouthing a prayer to any God that would listen, watching the tiny human shapes running to the rescue baskets.  
  
There was silence. And more silence.  
  
James gnawed at his bottom lip.  
  
Finally he heard an excited voice in his headset.  
  
"Control, this is Hung. Second baskets down and I think we're all," he abruptly broke contact.  
  
James sat without moving, his heart slamming in his chest. He didn't know what was going on, didn't even know what he was feeling. The relief he'd experienced upon hearing Hung's voice was gone. Why had he ceased to respond?  
  
Control was hollering at him now. "Hung? Hung, we're reading you, what is it?"  
  
Another unbearable measure of silence. Then Hung again, his voice distraught and panicky. "Oh, God, God... where's Samantha? Where's Samantha? Where's...?"  
  
James would remember little about the moments that followed besides a sense of foundering helplessness, of the world closing in around him, seeming to suck him into an airless, shrinking hole. He could only remember thinking one thing.  
  
Colonel Samantha Bond...  
  
Samantha...  
  
Samantha was gone... 


	2. Chapter II

"There is smoke in the cockpit. CA 19-8 and CA145 levels. Cabin pressure's dropping. Terra nos respute."  
  
James feels his book about to slip out of his hands, catches it just in the nick of time. He blinks once or twice, completely out of sorts, guessing he'd sunk into a deep sleep while reading on the couch.  
  
He had been reading, hadn't he?  
  
He readjusts the book and glances up at the man standing in front of him, the man whose voice had startled him from his doze... but then suddenly realizes that this isn't her living room.  
  
He straightens, blinks again, and rubs his eyes.  
  
The chair he is sitting on is hard plastic. It abruptly dawns on him that he is in Q- branch that has become so numbingly familiar over these past few months and where she must have dropped off with the book open in his lap.  
  
"007, what if I told you I can fast-forward time past Samantha's death to when she is old... What if I told you that you can have one more chance to say good-bye before she is really gone for good? If you are going to do this I would suggest you do it now. It only works once."  
  
What is he talking about?  
  
Q regards him a moment in that serious yet matter-of-fact way of his. Then he shrugs his sleeve back from his wristwatch, glances down at it, and holds it out to her, turning his arm to display the dial.  
  
"Yes, she has exactly fifteen minutes, to be precise," he says. "We're on the fast track now. Time runs by until there's none left."  
  
Perplexed by his comment, James looks at the watch.  
  
His eyes grow enormous.  
  
Its face is a blank white circle. Perfectly featureless, without digits, hands or markings of any kind.  
  
He feels another chunk of himself give way.  
  
Blank.  
  
The face of the watch is blank.  
  
"Stay calm, 007, it tends to run a bit ahead," Q says. "There's still a chance to say good-bye."  
  
James suddenly finds himself out of the chair, and this time making no attempt to catch his magazine as it spills off his lap, landing on the floor at his feet. From the corner of his eye, he sees that the cover, which has partially folded under one of the interior pages, consists of a photo of a shuttle and launch pad consumed by a rolling ball of flame.  
  
All at once James isn't sure he remembers, just as he'd initially been unable to remember being at Q-branch. His memory seems a flat, slippery surface without depth or width.  
  
"Your wife is in room 401. But you already know that, you've been there before." Q is saying. He gestures to the end of the corridor. The corridor all of a sudden stretches in length and James found him self in a hospital.  
  
Q starts down the corridor and he pauses and looks back at him, giving him thumbs up. "VIP's first and always," he says, and grins. "I'd advise you to hurry."  
  
He tips him a little salute and hustles down the hall.  
  
I'd advise you to hurry.  
  
His heart pounding in his chest, he forgets about Q and whirls toward the room which his wife lies dying.  
  
In an instant James is standing at the door. Breathless, he fells like he's come running over to it at a full dash, yet has no sense of her legs having carried him from Q-branch or even moving from point A to point B. It is as if she'd been starring at Q's back one moment, and found himself here in front of the door the next, trying to stop himself from falling to pieces in spite of the death sentence that has been pronounced upon his wife.  
  
For her sake, trying to hold up.  
  
He takes a deep gulp of air, and another. Then he reaches for the doorknob, turns it, and steps through into the room.  
  
The light inside is all wrong.  
  
Odd as it may be for him to register this before anything else, it is nevertheless what happens. The light is wrong. Not exactly dim, but diffuse enough to severely limit his vision. Although he can see the foot of his wife's bed without any problem, things start to blur immediately beyond it. As if through a layer of water, he sees the tubes, fluid drains, and monitor wires that run to the bed, sees the outline of Samantha's legs under the blanket, sees that she is resting on her back, but her face...  
  
He think suddenly of those televised news reports in which someone's features are blurred to protect his or her identity, the sort that might involve use of a hidden camera, or show crime suspects being lead towards the courthouse by the police. Pictures in which it almost looks as if Vaseline has been dabbed over the part of the frame in which the person's face ought to appear.  
  
That is how James sees his wife from the doorway of 401. There is a plaque above the door that reads:  
  
"Samantha Bond, aged 81 will die of cancer in 14 minutes 6 seconds."  
  
"James?"  
  
Samantha's voice is a horse whisper. Its weakness shakes James for a moment he thinks he is going to burst into tears. He covers his trembling lips with his palm. "James, is that you?"  
  
He stands there, trying to regain his composure, the room silent except for the quiet beeping of the instruments at Samantha's bedside. The fuzziness of the light makes him feel strangely lost and isolated, like a small boat adrift in fog.  
  
Finally he lowers his hand from his mouth.  
  
"Yes," he says. "It's me, hon. I'm here."  
  
"Come over here, James," she says. "Hard to talk when you're standing there by the door."  
  
He steps forward into the room. Her sleeve. Something about it isn't right, something about the color of it-  
  
"Come on, what are you waiting for?" she says.  
  
He wades through the filthy light towards his wife. Her IV stand and the wall of beeping instruments are on the left side of the bed, so he walks around its foot to the right and rolls back her plastic hospital tray in order to approach her.  
  
Suddenly her hand reaches over the safety rail and clutches his wrist.  
  
"Give it to us, James," she says. "Let's hear how sorry you are."  
  
He stands there in shock as her fingers press into him with impossible strength.  
  
"We trusted you," she says.  
  
Her fingers are digging deeper into the soft flesh under his wrist, hurting him now. Though James knows they will leave bruises, he does not attempt to pull away. He looks at Samantha across the bed, wishing he could see her face, mystified by her words.  
  
"Samantha, please tell me what you mean-"  
  
"My boy, always in a hurry, rushes from one place to another without looking back."  
  
He winces as her grip tightens.  
  
Who can she be talking about? Herself and the crew?  
  
James can scarcely guess.  
  
No, that isn't the truth. Not really.  
  
The simple, inescapable truth is that he's afraid to guess.  
  
Her grip tightens.  
  
He wishes he could see her face.  
  
"You were supposed to be responsible. Supposed to look out for us," she says.  
  
James still doesn't pull away, absolutely refuses to pull away. Instead he moves closer to her, pressing up against the bed rail, thinking if she could just see her face, if they could just see each other eye-to-eye, she would stop this nonsense about him leaving her –  
  
The thought is abruptly clipped short as his eyes once again fall on her sleeve. The color, yes, the color, how had he failed to identify it right away? He doesn't know the answer, but realizes now that what she's wearing isn't a pajama; it's a NASA flight suit. At the same instant this occurs to him, the quiet beep of the instruments measuring his wife's vital functions pitches up to a shrill alarm, an earsplitting sound he recognizes from some other place, some other when.  
  
It is a sound that makes him gasp in horror.  
  
The faceless woman in the bed is shouting at him at the top of her voice: "Cabin pressure's dropping! Look for yourself! Check the readings!"  
  
James awoke from the nightmare, his hands still clasped over his eyes; he felt a small bleak smile touch his lips.  
  
An instant later the tears begin streaming between his fingers. 


End file.
